Proposed stack exchange site for Interactive Fiction

Even though that failed three years ago?

I’m only saying it has more chance of succeeding with a wider scope, not that it will succeed.

Anyway, it’s three years on, and I believe an IF Stack Exchange has more chance of succeeding now. Stack Exchange sites were pretty new 3 years ago, and more people are familiar with them now. A quick look at Google Analytics shows me Stack Overflow’s traffic is now 3.5x what it was three years ago, so there’s potentially a bigger community of people now who are familiar with both IF and SE. We have more chance of reaching critical mass.

And if I look at *.stackexchange.com as a whole, 17x the number of visitors compared to 3 years ago.

Oh, and I think IF is bigger than 3 years ago, what with Twine etc.

One of the reasons why I thought it may work is that some of the sites that graduated out of beta only have a few thousand questions.

If people would prefer we host our own maybe we should look into it. I’m not in a position to organise the server but I’d be willing to help run it and I think we could get a subdomain for it on intfiction.org.

I’d be in favor of putting a sticky on top of the Inform 7 board that says, “consider posting your Inform 7 questions on stackoverflow!”

StackOverflow and friends are a programmer’s best friend. Surely there’s something like that for the writing realm? I’d imagine there’d be more questions from a writing site than a programming site. inform7.critters.org for example?

Would there be a reason for Inform 7 to distance itself from other IF systems though?

I was disappointed when this failed last time, and it looks like I’m going to be disappointed when it fails this time, too. Nevetherless, followed, and voted.

Interactive Fiction folk are a herd of cats. It took I think a year or more for people to leave Usenet and come to this forum. The IF-Wiki grew out of the single-minded dedication by David Welbourn. IFDB is simply a very useful tool for all of us. At this time, most Q&A type mentoring happens naturally through conversations (here, IFMud, e-mail). I personally love the Stack Overflow model, but I do understand that those natural communication channels are more prevalent. (Ask a co-worker first, then Google…which may lead me to Stack Overflow).

That said, I’m an active IF community member and I had no idea this thing existed…so maybe that’s a problem.

I don’t know if there are enough active Inform developers to sustain it though.

David C.
www.textfyre.com

Perhaps inevitably, the proposal didn’t get enough activity and was quietly deleted at some point.

We have a chicken-and-egg problem here - I think it’s hard to see what the site would look like, and hence gain support for it, without the site actually existing in the first place!

So, I have taken matters into my own hands - there’s an open source platform called Question2Answer that looks pretty good, so I have created a new site: IF Answers.

Technical questions about interactive fiction development tools such as Inform, Twine, Quest, Squiffy, Adrift, TADS etc. are all on-topic.

Non-technical questions about interactive fiction are also on-topic. These questions could be about general IF design, specific games, entering the IF Comp etc.

Let’s give this a go and see what happens… ifanswers.com

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That’s great! I noticed a little while ago that the proposal had been deleted and was thinking of setting something up, but I hadn’t had time to investigate the options yet. It’s not as full featured as Stack Exchange, but it looks like it will be enough.

Now one of the key issues is searching: how good is it’s search engine? When you ask a question is it likely to show you questions that are actually similar first? If so then I’d be keen to promote it in the board descriptions of the forum here.

I don’t know how good the search engine is - I suppose we can try to evaluate it by looking at popular sites that run Question2Answer: question2answer.org/sites.php. I guess we’ll only really know how well it works for us when we’ve got some more content there.

I’ve just turned on the option that shows related questions when you ask one, so we can see how that goes. It has a setting for how closely the question has to match - widest, wider, default, narrower, narrowest. I’ve left it at the default for now, and we can tweak it once we have a better idea of how it’s performing.

Nice move, Alex! Let’s not be shy about posting q&a for things we already know the answer to, just to get it going…

Absolutely! Self-answering is positively encouraged, especially as we seed the site with questions. Eventually the site should be like a live FAQ (and a not-so-F-AQ as well), so we definitely need people to ask and answer even the really obvious stuff.

Here are the sample questions that the now-deleted Stack Exchange proposal received, in case it helps when thinking up FAQs. (Seeing as this information doesn’t appear to be publicly available anywhere, and I have the means…)

upvotes	downvotes	title
2	0	How can I make an empty command do something? [Inform 7]
0	2	Am I right to think X is a bug?
9	0	How can I make the inventory list display in alphabetical order? [TADS 3]
10	0	How can I make one of the characters always be in scope? [Inform 7]
0	0	Can I pause playing sounds in Glulx?
11	0	How do I conditionally display an object in the room description?
10	0	How do I prevent this spurious line break in the displayed text?
10	0	How do you make a dog that follows the player wherever she goes? 
0	2	Help me come up with an interesting puzzle for getting into an airlock of a spaceship. 
0	1	What's the best way of allowing the player to pick up an animal? [Inform 7]
2	0	Can I create a 'to decide...' phrase that returns nothing?
4	0	How do I make a cupboard act as both container and supporter? [Inform 7]
2	0	Can I show a video in Twine?
2	0	How should I make a device which is also a container? For example, a tape deck or a toaster.
2	0	In my "After entering a room" rule, why is the condition "if the room was empty" always true? [Inform 7]
7	0	How can I warn the player when they've just made the game unwinnable?
3	0	This code won't compile with the new version of Inform. How can I get it working again?
1	0	How do I do basic debugging in I6 if I only know I7?
0	0	I think I found a bug in Inform! How do I check/report it or see if it's been reported?
0	0	How do you define "hidden" objects? [Inform6]
0	0	How do I compile a release of a IF game?
0	0	What is the difference between Sugarcane and Sugarcube etc? [Twine]

Now one thing we will eventually need is the ability to mark duplicate questions. From looking on Google I think that’s probably already built in, but new users can’t close questions.

Some add-ons that might be good:
Edit History
Open Questions Plugin
User History Plugin
Privilege Management
Role Markers
Sort Answers
Question Merge

I also have gotten really used to Markdown on Stack Exchange, so maybe switching the editor to use that might help :stuck_out_tongue: I couldn’t figure out how to get my code properly formatted in this answer.

Ah, great - I hadn’t started looking at extensions at all yet, but those sound good. And agreed about Markdown!

Can we ask loaded questions e.g. ones we know the answer to, but ones we bet other people don’t and it would help them a lot?

Because I have a lot of those, but I don’t want to cheat. I’d like to have somewhere to put them. They’re not quite documentation, but they’re not worthless. I really would like to have a tips repository somewhere.

Yep definitely, that’s what we were calling self-answering.